On Wednesday morning, well before the school run started, Mary Granlund was attempting to coax her dog outside for a brief walk in negative-two-degree weather, and her phone was already pinging with texts. “It’s, like, ‘Can someone help bring my kids to school today?’ ‘Can anybody pick my kids up from school today?’ ‘Has anyone called the police about the abandoned car?’ ” she told me.
Granlund is the chair of the school board in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, a northeastern suburb of Minneapolis. This community of about three square miles and twenty-two thousand people is, like much of the greater Minneapolis metro area, presently swarmed with agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, and has been for weeks. Many parents who used to ferry their children to and from school every day have either been captured by ICE or are sheltering in place out of fear. Empty cars in the road are a common sight: lights on, engine still running, doors flung open. Educators and parents in the district have been working as chauffeurs, delivery drivers, bodyguards, and deterrence squads.
Among the untold thousands of children nationwide who have been swallowed up in ICE dragnets, six of them are students in the Columbia Heights school district. One is a fourth grader who was abducted with her mother when they were driving to school; they are currently being held in the notoriously abject South Texas Family Residential Center, in Dilley, Texas. Two seventeen-year-old students were also taken: one, a boy, is back home, but the other, a girl, is in Dilley. On Thursday, a pair of siblings in the second and fifth grade were taken into federal custody with their mother; they, too, are in Dilley.
So is the sixth student, Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old boy from Ecuador. A single image of the little boy, snapped by a neighbor at the scene of his abduction, has become iconic of Operation Metro Surge, which is what the Department of Homeland Security calls their occupation of Minneapolis. In the picture, Liam stands next to a salt-stained S.U.V., bundled up for the cold and wearing a bright-blue winter hat with fluffy white bunny ears. Behind him, the disembodied hand of a federal agent grips his Spider-Man backpack.
Granlund, in her capacity as school-board chair, has repeatedly demanded that ICE agents leave public-school property; in the first of these encounters, a few weeks ago, a masked ICE agent used his phone to record Granlund, her car, and her license plate, while reciting aloud her full legal name and address. Teachers at Highland Elementary School routinely stick around after dismissal to patrol the perimeter of the high school next door—where Homeland Security agents often loiter—as it lets out for the day. “I’ve seen first-grade teachers and music teachers with whistles in hand, running toward ICE,” Zena Stenvik, the Columbia Heights Public Schools superintendent, told me. “Literally, educators are putting their bodies between ICE agents and children.” On January 21st, an ICE vehicle pulled into the loading dock of the high school; in a video of the incident, taken from a classroom window, students can be overheard in a hubbub of jeering, incredulity, and fear.
Recently, Granlund was picking up her son from the high school when she heard that ICE had descended on a nearby apartment complex, one that is home to many students in the district. She ran with some teachers, blowing their whistles, to the parking lot where ICE agents had been spotted. In a video of the incident, about a half-dozen women, unarmed and dressed for the classroom, square off against at least four masked agents of the federal government, their chests puffed out under bulky tactical gear. The women scream at ICE to get out, that they are not welcome in their community. “Are your moms proud of you?” one calls out. “Do they know what you do? Do they know that you separate families?”
In the video, the ICE guys mill about, menacing yet uncertain. One of them has fashioned a sinister balaclava out of his cap and neck gaiter. “You cos-patriot fucking losers, Jesus Christ, go!” a woman yells. As the ICE agents fade back into their vehicles, one of them dawdles as he gets into a passenger seat, making sure to position his gun so that the women can see it before he shuts the door. “Ooh, you have a fucking gun?” one of the women taunts him. “Is your penis that small?”
The ICE agents eventually did leave, empty-handed. Less than a week later, another encounter on the school run had a different outcome. On January 20th, Granlund was again on her way to pick up her kids when she drove past a familiar sight: a cluster of parked cars, people honking and screaming and blowing whistles. She got out of her car and ran toward the commotion, her school-board lanyard in hand. “The school is here!” someone called out. The abduction of Liam Conejo Ramos and his father—both of whom have pending asylum claims—was unfolding in the driveway of the family’s home, on a street where Granlund often walks her dog.
“I kept screaming that I could take him,” Granlund said. “It happens all the time that parents miss the bus stop because they had to work late, they got caught in traffic, whatever, and our policy is to bring the kid back to school and they can wait there.” As horrifying as the scene in the driveway was, Granlund could instantly calculate her most useful place in it: she’s the lady who looks after the boy whose father is unexpectedly unavailable. She went on, “I’ve had a background check”—meaning that she was vetted to care for kids—“and I knew I could keep Liam physically safe. There was no reason—I was saying, ‘I’m from the school; I can take him.’ And they took him, and I’m, like, What—where did—where did he go? They took him. They took Liam.”
Detainees at the Dilley facility have reported moldy food, unclean drinking water, unsanitary living conditions, and inadequate medical care; Liam has a persistent fever, is lethargic, and is not eating well, Stenvik told me. The Flores Settlement Agreement, which sets minimal standards for children in federal custody, requires that they be placed in the “least restrictive” setting according to their age and needs. “But there is no reason for ICE to detain Liam to begin with,” Ann Garcia, a senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Project, said. “Liam and his family have pending asylum applications. They have done nothing contrary to their immigration obligations that would warrant any detention, especially when Liam is quickly decompensating in detention. The ‘least restrictive setting’ for Liam is at home with his family in Minneapolis.”
On January 28th, three U.S. representatives from Texas, including Joaquin Castro, visited the Dilley facility, and afterward expressed concerns about the mental and physical health of the children who are trapped there. Castro also reported that ICE had taken Liam’s bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, and that Liam is hoping to get them back.
Columbia Heights was as prepared for an immigration crackdown as could be reasonably expected of any community or school system—but there has been nothing reasonable about the ICE terror campaign. After the 2024 election of Donald Trump, who promised mass deportations, the school district partnered with a local law firm to offer parents free informational sessions in English and Spanish on immigration rights. “We were all very prepared for what to do if—naïvely, in my imagination—an ICE agent came to the door with a signed judicial warrant,” Stenvik said. “That’s not at all what is happening. This is indiscriminate.”
Schools also worked with vulnerable families to notarize a form assigning delegation of parental authority, or DOPA, which insures a temporary transfer of custody and caregiving decisions to a trusted adult, in case a parent is abducted by ICE. “A lot of our families have filled out DOPA forms, so we are able to place those students in caring hands,” Jason Kuhlman, the principal of Valley View Elementary, said. Three of Kuhlman’s students at Valley View—including Liam, who was enrolled in the pre-K program—are now in Dilley. “Typically, what we’re seeing is that ICE picks up one parent. It’s malicious, because the other parent probably isn’t going to be able to make it by themselves. They’re going to self-deport, or they will deport the whole family in order to stay together,” Kuhlman said. Not as many families signed ICE’s so-called “privacy waivers” before being arrested or detained, giving Homeland Security a pretext for withholding vital information from legislators and schools about the families it has captured.
Valley View’s student population is two-thirds Hispanic, with a sizable Ecuadorian population, and thus especially vulnerable to ICE. Kuhlman told me about one of his fourth graders, whose mother was taken by ICE while she was walking to the local supermarket to buy formula for her baby. The student’s grandmother, who also lived in the home and was caring for the infant, was too frightened to pick up the older child at school, so officials scrambled to find the child’s uncle. At Valley View alone, at least twenty-three families have had a mother or a father taken by ICE. “And that’s not counting grandmas and grandpas, that’s not aunts and uncles,” Kuhlman added, noting that many of his students live in multigenerational and extended-family households.
School administrators have started calling families after raids to make sure that no children are left behind after their caregivers have been abducted. “There have been many evenings,” Stenvik said, “when a home in the community has been raided, and I look up the address to see if any students of ours live there, and then I call the parent or the emergency contact to say—and I have actually had to say this—‘Was your four-year-old left alone? Do you know where your four-year-old is?’ ”
School life has both widened and narrowed in Columbia Heights since the all-out assault on Minneapolis began. Local educators now see providing security details for their students as part of their job description. Their schools double as food banks. Kuhlman spent much of January 23rd delivering laptops to students who have opted for remote learning. (Absentee rates at Valley View peaked at around twenty-five per cent, Kuhlman said, before remote learning ramped up.) In a throwback to the pandemic, Kuhlman and his colleagues worked up the new program in a matter of days—but Valley View has none of the funding that poured into school districts during the COVID crisis.
Caution and fear, laced with anguish, must inform every decision. Parents who volunteer to drop off or pick up children from at-risk families “have reported being followed by unmarked vehicles or suspicious vehicles,” Stenvik said. “ICE agents have come up to their cars and looked in the back seat to see, seemingly, if there are children there.” Masked men in tactical gear sometimes park in unmarked cars outside Granlund’s house; on at least two occasions, she said, they stayed all day. After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, on January 7th, and after ICE raided a Mexican restaurant just a few blocks away from Highland Elementary, Stenvik began to worry about stray bullets, and directed the elementary schools to keep children inside for recess. On January 24th, the day that Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, three ICE vehicles descended upon the Columbia Heights high school, which was hosting a volleyball tournament. “So, apparently, we can’t just have a good old volleyball tournament without harassment,” Stenvik said.
Stenvik cancelled the annual all-district band concert, scheduled for last week, in which players from the elementary, middle, and high schools perform together on one stage. “It’s the most magical thing you’ve ever heard,” Stenvik said. “I thought, Could we live-stream it? Could we do it during the school day?” In the end, she decided “to err on the side of safety,” especially as many of the young musicians likely would not show up. “For a high-level ensemble,” Stenvik said, “you need all of the parts.”
What educators in Columbia Heights are keen to convey to the world outside is that—despite national revulsion toward Operation Metro Surge, despite the shock and sorrow generated by the killings of Good and Pretti and by the abduction of Liam, despite the recent dismissal of Border Patrol’s so-called commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, who worked hard and haplessly to become the public face of the war on Minneapolis, and despite statements on Thursday by President Trump’s so-called border czar, Tom Homan, suggesting that he intends to draw down D.H.S. presence in the Minneapolis area—the war is far from over. From some perspectives, it is intensifying.
“It’s worse since Bovino got kicked out,” Granlund told me. Kuhlman said, “The number of abductions, the number of agents in our community, has not decreased. If anything, it feels retaliatory now”—in part because of the attention that Liam’s case has received and the awful light it sheds on the immigration crackdown. Three Valley View parents were detained over the weekend of January 24th and 25th. Another was abducted on Wednesday morning. Three high-school students, in separate incidents, were pulled over by ICE on their way to school on Thursday morning; none of these kids were detained. On Friday morning, Stenvik drove around for an hour before the school run, focussing on areas where ICE has previously targeted students and checking that children were getting to school safely. Sure enough, she spotted a pair of masked agents in an ICE-identified vehicle, parked near Highland Elementary and the high school.
Kuhlman told me that he recently visited a fifth-grade classroom during their morning meeting because, he said, “we were having some issues in there.” He asked everyone to put up their hand if they felt afraid of ICE. “My hand went up, the teacher’s hand went up, and a lot of the kids’ hands went up,” Kuhlman said. The subtext was an old adage: courage is not the absence of fear. “Kids look to us to be the strong figures, but you can be strong and afraid,” Kuhlman told me. “I was saying, ‘Yep, I’m scared, too, but when you’re inside our building, we will keep you safe. They are not coming in here. This is your space.’ ”
The day before Valley View Elementary launched its remote-learning program, the school had an e-learning day for all students, ostensibly owing to extremely cold temperatures. “I had to tell the students that this would be the last time they’d all be together for a while. It killed me,” Kuhlman said, his voice breaking. “We create strong cultures and class communities, and we see that fragmenting. We’re telling kids—elementary-school kids—that they can’t see their friends because it’s not safe. And why is that? Because we have people hunting you.” ♦







